Education in the Kitchen

Sometimes parents seem to abandon common sense when it comes to feeding their children. In this country, for example, and in a growing number of developing countries throughout the world, breastfeeding is sadly not necessarily the first choice for feeding infants. In China, the increasing number of babies fed with formula has led to yet another food-contamination crisis--this time over formula tainted with melamine.

The inability to nurse a newborn is rare in cultures where breastfeeding is seen as appropriate, natural, and preferred, and where mothers have the unstinting support of their physicians, nurses, families, and communities. And while it's true that breastfeeding is on the rise in the United States, mothers still only nurse for a few months and are then anxious to wean their kids to solid foods, usually those promoted most heavily by Big Baby Food--even though breastfeeding exclusively for five months or so, and then very gradually introducing other foods, helps curb obesity and food allergies. (Statistics on the advantages, prevalence, and duration of breastfeeding in the U. S. are available through the Centers for Disease Control and through La Leche League International.)

What brought all this to mind, in addition to the increasingly alarming news from China, was an article in last Sunday's New York Times: Six Food Mistakes that Parents Make, by Tara Parker-Pope. In it she tells of a child whose preschool diet consisted of chocolate-laced "meals" of all varieties (just as some friends of ours once fed their daughter pizza almost exclusively)--because that's all he would eat. It turns out to be easier to feed your kids whatever they want in the interest of feeding them something rather than nothing.

Having picky eaters at all is, of course, a reflection of an affluent society with an overabundance of choices. Starving children eat anything they can; only the rich have children who demand chocolate for breakfast. But almost every parent experiences some degree of food-fussiness, and Parker-Hope's article is full of great suggestions on how to avoid conflicts.

Most of the advice is common sense, however, and if we were less concerned with just getting our kids to eat, and more concerned about what we're teaching them about the role of food in their lives, we'd probably have healthier, less demanding children. Of course, they'd have less fun manipulating their parents, too--but I think it would be far more enjoyable to interact with kids by teaching them how to choose and prepare foods wisely than by trying to force them into patterns that can lead to decidedly unhealthful ways of viewing food in general.

For example, kids--like all human beings--are metaphor makers. If we tell them to eat one way, but eat another ourselves, they arrive at an inevitable conclusion: my mother's a liar. By following the diet du jour, but insisting that our children eat something different (a more "balanced" meal while we have at the Atkins packaged dinners), we're falling into the old "do what I say, not what I do" trap, which has no consequence other than to make parents look as if they have no control over themselves.

My own biggest mistake was not being more generous in the kitchen; I tended to see it as my own domain, and seldom encouraged my kids to cook with me. Another was to follow a highly restricted diet, albeit for ethical and religious reasons. While my children were growing up I was a vegetarian; not only that, I kept a Kosher home, which further restricted the types of cheese and other products I bought for home consumption. I did have the good sense to pretty much let the children eat whatever they wanted outside of the house, but I knew the jig was up when they started hanging over the meat counter at the grocery store, drooling longingly over the steaks.

The compromise was happy chickens. I had abstained from meat not because I thought there was something morally wrong with eating it, but because I couldn't take the responsibility for killing it myself and therefore thought I had no right to eat it. The Kosher part was for community; I wanted any friends of any degree of Jewishness (or Gentility, as it were) to be able to eat at my table. Eventually, however, I realized that I could serve cold vegetable meals on glass plates to my Orthodox friends, and buy organic, free-range meat without suffering too much guilt. By that time, however, my children's habits were firmly in place, and I'll have to wait for grandchildren in order to do it right.

But anyone with small children can use mealtime as a teaching and learning experience, and not just about food. Maths can be taught through baking; history and geography can sneak into a meal based on a particular ethnic cuisine; even films and literature can provide foundations for a meal--through books like The Joyce of Cooking, the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, and It Came From the Kitchen. Art history's a natural: try constructing a meal based on a painting, or dive into recipes from one of the many artists who loved food: Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet.

Common-sense eating can easily become part of a natural education: from the growing of food to understanding its history and culture. For background, parents can consult websites like The Food Timeline, Betty Fussel's, The Story of Corn, H. E. Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread. And then there are the likes of The Philosopher's Kitchen (Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook) by Francine Segan (who also wrote Movie Menus and Shakespeare's Kitchen), Jean Bottéro's The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia, and James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (the link to the latter is to its first chapter). Simply having books like these on the shelves of one's house can prompt discussions about food, history, nutrition, culture, science, and any number of topics among parents and children.

Parker-Pope notes in her article that the more kids are involved in food preparation, the more likely they are to eat what they make, not only at home, but elsewhere. I can't think of a more powerful schoolroom, in fact, than a kitchen in which children are welcome, and a garden in which children help to grow what they eat. Home-schoolers have a wonderful opportunity to integrate all manner of learning while simply caring for home and hearth; but even kids in traditional schools can reap enormous benefits from being included in meal-planning and preparation, and from accompanying their parents to grocery stores and/or farmer's markets to help select the food they'll eventually eat.

As it turns out, cooking and eating provide not only the basic framework for survival in the world, but for learning about it as well. Think of how much smarter we'd all be if we actually mastered the skills necessary to plant, harvest, prepare, and cook most of what we eat--just like our pioneer ancestors had to. Sharing food among family and friends grounds community, and offers a deeply resonant metaphor for living, teaching, and learning well.

Images: A Helping Hand, by Eugen von Blaas, 1884; Mary Cassatt, Maternité, 1890. Both from Wikimedia Commons.